The picture painted by the Crown was of two people who really had no business raising children.

On the last day of Ryker Daponte-Michaud’s life, assistant Crown attorney Elizabeth Maguire suggested his mother, Amanda Dumont, 32, and her then-boyfriend, Scott Bakker, 27, were holed up in the basement bedroom of the Penny Lane townhouse in Strathroy texting friends and family and paying no attention to the injured child upstairs.

“He was quiet. He wasn’t making any noise,” said Maguire in her closing arguments at the Superior Court trial.

“They simply forgot about him because they didn’t hear him.”

This was three days after Ryker had been badly burned by Bakker’s cup of coffee. In the intervening days, the couple drove to Parkhill once, Sarnia twice, fenced stolen jewelry Bakker had swiped from his own grandmother, lied about taking the boy for medical attention, shopped, fixed slashed tires and searched for a lost dog.

They didn’t take the child to his pediatrician, a clinic or the hospital just around the corner. Only once in the labyrinth of texting and talking does his mother and boyfriend mention her injured son.

Dumont and Bakker were “the most selfish, self-absorbed people,” Maguire said. And Ryker, just 20 months old, was dying.

The crux of the Crown’s final argument focused on a perceived lack of concern for a little boy seemingly banished to his crib to cope alone with horrific burns to his back, lower torso, genitals, buttocks and upper legs caused by a scalding cup of instant coffee.

More than three years after Ryker’s death, Dumont and Bakker will find out Justice Renee Pomerance’s judgment in the case on Sept. 28.

Pomerance will have to weigh adversarial defences in which each of the former lovers tried to pin the blame on the other. She also will have to assess what happened within the family that leaned on government handouts to survive and hard drugs to cope.

Also looming large at the retrial are the horrifying photographs of the little boy’s body showing the extent of his injuries.

Dumont’s defence lawyer, Ken Marley, finished up his argument Wednesday, reiterating Dumont’s contention that she gave up parental responsibilities to Bakker for the last two days of her son’s life.

She had, Marley said, “an honestly held belief” that Bakker was true to his word when he said Ryker was fine.

Pomerance questioned Dumont’s assertions she didn’t write some of the text messages and commented that Dumont seemed to distance herself from anything “that might put her in a bad light.”

Dumont also maintained the burns were only red-pink when she saw them and never had blisters, something an expert witness contradicted.

Marley said Pomerance should rely on the evidence of Bessie Lagerwerf, Dumont’s grandmother, who saw some of the burns. Lagerwerf, Marley reminded the judge, had been a nurse and didn’t see blisters.

And Dumont had plans to take Ryker for a medical checkup.

“Ms. Dumont did what a reasonable parent equipped with information . . . and what she had known based on inquiries made” would do, he said — she put ointment on the burns and sought advice online and from family before Bakker took over.

Maguire noted evidence that Bakker had a parenting role. He referred to Ryker as his son, wrote “we are a family,” and lived at the townhouse. He changed diapers, picked up the girls at school and would discipline them.

He was under investigation by child welfare services in Sarnia for possibly physically abusing one of the daughters.

Both Dumont and Bakker were using crystal meth and Bakker threw away meth pipes before calling 911 the night Ryker died, Maguire said.

Maguire also pointed out with all of Ryker’s blistering, festering wounds, the toddler was taken around in his car seat for hours the day after his burns, then left in his crib. She said Dumont tried to hide the injuries from her grandmother and everyone else.

Some of the best trial evidence, Maguire said, came from Dumont’s 13-year-old daughter, who described how sick the little boy was, how he cried all the time, then eventually became very quiet and unable to hold his bottle.

Maguire said Dumont’s insistence she didn’t see Ryker for two days “frankly defies imagination”

A video of the couple in the police cellblock after their arrest is “an interesting window into the relationship of these two people,” Maguire said. Bakker, she said, is not in control of the relationship.

While motive doesn’t have to be proven, Maguire reminded Pomerance that Dumont didn’t want Ontario Works to know Bakker was living at the townhouse. As well, Children’s Aid had a file open and a doctor’s report on Ryker would have knocked down their carefully constructed front.

She cited a text message Dumont sent her sister the day Ryker died, the day Maguire concluded the couple were holed up in their basement while the tot was dying. “I’ve been slacking today,” Dumont wrote.

“Any reasonable person, even a reasonably prudent parent, would know that the child needed treatment,” Maguire said, calling it “a complete and utter indifference to the life of Ryker.”